


Is This It?

by comeincomeout



Category: Last Shadow Puppets
Genre: Alex has feelings, Everything You've Come to Expect Era, Flashbacks, Light Angst, Longing, M/M, Miles makes Alex melt into 1000 pieces simply by existing :-), Touring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-09-06
Packaged: 2018-08-13 12:12:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7976410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/comeincomeout/pseuds/comeincomeout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>4. Their lives are nothing but a series of these little moments that, when Alex forces them together in his mind late at night, a coherent narrative never springs from. There is no love story. There is no beginning, no climax, no end – there's some odd, extended hiatuses and a lot of pretending and then, somewhere in between, two people who just know very well all the things the word “soulmate” could mean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Is This It?

**Author's Note:**

> Simply the product of me projecting my emotions about the end of the EYCTE era onto poor, poor Alex Turner lmao

 

**2016.  
** **15 January.  
** **London, UK.**

Alone at his breakfast bar in the morning, Alex blows bubbles into his cola through the straw. He picks his sunglasses off the counter in front of him, sliding them over his eyes to block out the sun coming through the ceiling-length window.

His phone's been buzzing endlessly all week. It's shaking with a phonecall now, loud on the marble of the counter. He groans and lowers his face into his forearm that's rested nearby, answering with the other hand.

“Hullo.”

“Are you ill or hungover?” Miles asks. Alex lifts his head only slightly, resting his chin 9firmly on his arm now.

“Both.”

“Peachy.” He laughs; it crackles through the receiver. Alex groans a little. “Phoned to ask if you'd made up your mind.”

“Did you now.”

“Oh, cheer up.”

“You cheer up,” Alex says. He makes a face no one can see.

“You're the one that said, _let's make another album!_ ” Miles exclaims in the high-pitched voice he uses to tease. Alex's cheeks feel warm and he turns his face into his arm again, muffling his own voice. What an idea that had been.

Here we are. Life is a series of individual moments that collaborate in an attempt to write one single, coherent manuscript with your fucking name on it – that's what Helders slurred in his direction last night while they were taking the piss and downing five beers an hour in a pub off Carnaby St.

“Miles,” he says, admittedly chuckling through his nose. Sure it is.

“I'm only joking.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

The first single's just dropped last week. Things will already be different by the next one. Alex closes his eyes behind his sunglasses, sleepy and with uninvited butterflies in his stomach.

“You'd best get on now. I'll be seeing enough of you, thanks.”

“Yeah,” Miles agrees.

~

**2016.  
** **11 April.  
** **New York, NY.**

Alex doesn't keep a journal of all the lies he's ever told himself or a schedule of all the times anyone's ever touched him, but he knows Miles has kissed his neck 76 times thus far this tour. Buzzed and content, he just wants him to hit 77 already.

(There hasn't been a single gig they didn't corner one another in some dark corner after, undoing belt buckles and breathing into each others' mouths. He's made up his mind alright.)

Miles spins him around and kisses him before he can get the hotel room door to agree with his key card. The knob prods Alex's backside and his arm stays half twisted around, the card still halfway into the lock, and Miles' tongue is in Alex's mouth because that's exactly where Alex wants it to be. Already hard underneath his two-hundred quid trousers, he must've been watching Alex all night. Gone are butterflies and Alex's stomach just fucking hurts, like he's fourteen years old, about to hook up with his seventh year crush at the end-of-year dance. Miles is Miles.

His hands are both on Alex's waist, thumbing underneath his shirt. It's just a pit stop before he reaches all the way around him and pries the key card away. Alex re-positions his arm comfortably slung over Miles' shoulder, playing with the collar of his jacket as they kiss. Miles keeps jamming the key card in and out of the lock, jiggling the doorknob with the other hand.

On the fourth try, the door groans open. Miles lifts Alex up by his legs, walking backwards towards the bed as Alex clings to him like a koala. He first ends up in his lap like a call girl, undoing buttons of his shirt. Then he's on his knees on the bed.

“Found your phone.”

(Alex forgot they'd come up here to get his phone.)

Miles kisses his shoulders. Says something silly about, you forgot that shit on purpose, didn't you, yes, you're too, too tricky like that. Lubes two fingers up and starts fingering him like it's as casual a gesture as anything else.

Alex bites down on his lip until it stings. The two fingers inside him continually brush against what has to be the answer to all pain and suffering in the world, and Miles isn't even doing anything. He's stretching and tensing his knuckles, not unlike he's warming up to play the guitar. Alex's kneecaps shake against the firm, hotel room mattress from the sensation. He arches forward until his overgrown fringe can't splay across the headboard any further and the wood against his forehead starts to make him sweat. Miles gives him a kiss on the neck.

"Well," Alex starts but can't really finish.

"Shut it," Miles whispers, like the invasive hum of the nearby air conditioning unit might overhear.

"You shut it, Mi-i-i-iles."

" _Mi-i-i-iles_!"

The two of them start giggling like schoolboys, Miles' nose smushed up against the bottom of Alex's jaw. Alex leans his head sideways, any retort he might've had getting lost in the laughs and the sighs and the way his soul drops when Miles reaches his other hand around and starts jerking him off. Head still hanging between his arms, Alex closes both eyes and his laughter fades to a moan. Miles, who always knows exactly which buttons to push and when to push them, has the last laugh right in his ear, soft and affectionate.

(Alex's favourite part of Miles' body are his hands. He could never forget that--)

~ 

**2015.  
** **16 July.  
** **Malibu Beach, CA.**

“I'd gone for a swim!” Alex shouts up to the balcony of Miles' room in the villa. It's up on the second floor, the wind tapping against the half-closed screen door as Miles stands in the doorway, smoking and looking down. He looks like nothing but a stick figure with a buzzcut and suit trousers (no shirt) from where Alex is standing. Alex isn't actually sure if he hears him. “Mi!”

“I've heard,” Miles shouts back, stepping fully out onto the balcony. His skin, tanner from all these days in the sun, is just slightly sweaty. “No invitation?”

Alex bows forward and extends one arm up towards the balcony in some sort of interpretative dance, daring Miles to scale the few feet of height between them. Miles dangles both arms over the balcony railing, reaching out for the sopping, sandy mess that is Alex with seemingly all the energy in his fingers.

“Ughhhh,” he moans, backstepping then swinging one leg up over the side railing. He eyes the closest land-able brick below. There's a few of them, bright yellow and deep orange like the psychedelic villa's entire exterior, that are ideal for makeshift stepping stones on his Romeo & Juliet escapade. Alex holds his pose curiously. Only Miles.

“Aaaaaahhhhhh,” Miles goes on, louder and more ceremoniously, as he scales the building towards the ground. Alex keeps his pose until Miles has both feet on the ground in a solid 9/10 landing, then he spins and falls to his knees in the sand. Miles walks over and stands in front of him, hands on his hips, until Alex stands and holds up nine fingers. Miles holds up ten – his fingers slender and much more important.

“Thought we might stay in for tea,” he adds, “I did, truly.”

They link arms and walk across the beach, campy and taking steps in time with one another. The sand is warm. Alex can hear the surf even from the sand dunes as they attempt to hike over them, never letting go and persevering to never fall out of step either. Through laughter and sinking and making backwards progress uphill. “Felix!” Miles shouts in their own language, tensing his arm as Alex loses his footing and starts to cascade down.

Muscles flexing, he lifts Alex like he's a barbell and deposits them both atop the dune, stomach to stomach with Alex on top. The surf sounds even louder this close to the ground. Miles looks very serious until he doesn't; they start laughing again. Alex will go on to tell all the journalists that recording in Malibu with just each other and the sunshine felt like a vacation, but that's a lie. It rather feels like exactly where he's supposed to be. It rather feels like home.

**~**

**2008.  
** **1 November.  
** **Los Angeles, CA.**

_A moment:_

“This one's called Standing Next to Me,” Miles says into a microphone. He goes and stands next to Alex.

Alex wishes they'd had more than 22 gigs, more than 36 precious hours, more than – oh, just a little bit more time to be in their own world. Miles leans their heads together as he plays, smiling from behind the inadvertently popped collar of his shirt. _Well it's not over until it's begun, is it, mate._

**~**

**2016.  
** **18 June.  
** **Glastonbury, UK.**

– that there's no one else on this fucking planet that can play classically trained guitar licks all night and still have the hand strength to touch every single strand of Alex's unwashed hair as they sit on a bench in the grass. Far, far away, momentarily, from the music and the crowds. It's this moment, as the sun sets and tens of people are off wandering somewhere looking for them, that he's just caught up to the plot. Miles thumb is resting on the v of his hairline, callused and familiar. It is what it is: no amount of time is going to be the right amount of time, the proper amount of time, the _satisfying_ amount of time. Alex is absolutely doomed to needing moment after moment after moment that he can't truly own.

“Still got no idea where I'm at by now, and I look ahead and suddenly there's eleven... Alex.”

Miles trails and stops himself when he must notice the clear lack of focus on the story he's telling, of which Alex has only heard the first word (“Alex”) and the most recent word (“Alex”). He taps his thumb annoyingly against Alex's forehead until Alex swats him off.

“I'm thinking,” Alex says, rubbing the spot where Miles' thumb was. Miles politely puts his hands in his lap and smirks.

“Mm.”

_What are you thinking about?_ he could ask, but he doesn't, because he already knows or it doesn't matter. Instead he sighs loudly – like the female lead of a 1960s film – and lowers his head onto Alex's shoulder. He stretches his legs far out ahead of him and whisks his arm swiftly over his forehead for emphasis. Alex starts wiggling his shoulders.

“Your mobile,” Miles says in the same sort of manner, introducing a dramatic tremble into his voice. Alex does, in fact, feel his pocket vibrating underneath Miles' weight. He makes no move to answer it this time. Conflicting themes. He's thinking about a lot of things, right. 1. The time must be getting close to midnight. 2. It doesn't mean much, but it's on his mind that his girlfriend hasn't had a conversation of longer than 15 minutes with him all week, because he's already tired by the summer heat or because it doesn't _matter_.

“I'm not bothered,” Alex mumbles. Miles yawns.

“You'll be in trouble, you.”

“With who? With you?”

“With me, yeah, with me.”

The wiggling apparently gets to Miles, finally. He stops it with a kiss. Head suddenly turned, his nose against Alex's shoulder blade, it's just a gentle one in the same spot he always aims for.

“Your story,” Alex offers. Miles sits up, holding one finger in front of his face.

“Yes.  _Alright, listen: eleven xylophones,_ ” he says, as if Alex is meant to always know exactly what he's on about. 3. Miles is the only person who has ever sat on a bench with him for this long, even though Alex wasn't listening to a single thing he's saying and he'd already kissed his neck earlier today anyway. Most others might settle and fuck off at that. Miles never does.

He looks at Alex expectantly. Alex returns the stare.

“I'm all eyes, ears, tongues. Eleven xylophones.”

In a story-telling voice: “ _I'm lost. Oh, very exhausted._...” Miles trails off, returning to a more normal voice. “Standing and trying to figure out which way's north so I can find out who's bloody idea that was anyway, so, now – oh, and you're over underneath the dressing room vanity. I believe you've just dropped your--" -- in a story-telling voice -- "mobile phone.”

“This is a true story, is it?” Alex confirms.

“What? Can't believe you'd lose something you've lost nightly so far?”

“Alright, alright, don't get--”

“ _Excessive,_ ” they say at the same time, in the same voice.

“Cheeky,” Alex adds. Miles laughs at him like it's untrue, though Alex knows he knows it isn't. Miles' brand of affection is clever and subtle; little kisses on the cheek, an innuendo-laden comment in a crowded room, a wink behind sunglasses. He's perfected it, too. Just in time for Alex to, yes, somehow always know exactly what he's on about.

“Sweetheart. Don't,” Miles waves his hand and pokes Alex right in the letters screen printed across his chest. “ _Give a damn_.”

4\. Their lives are nothing but a series of these little moments that, when Alex forces them together in his mind late at night, a coherent narrative never springs from. There is no love “story.” There is no beginning, no climax, no end – there's some weird, extended hiatuses and a lot of pretending and then, somewhere in between, two people who just know very well all the things the word “soulmate” could mean.

**~**

**2014.**  
1 September.  
Los Angeles, CA.

“It's been a minute.”

“Has it now.”

Miles stares at him, somewhat impressed by the retort. Alex raises just one eyebrow. He's practiced doing so in the mirror for a long time and he thinks he's finally got it quite right. Miles' flat is always well-decorated and relatively well-kept; the sofa, white leather and still stainless, takes up half the common room, accented with potted plants on either side. So very, very L.A. They haven't seen each other much this year.

“Has it?” Miles repeats when he doesn't answer. One knee bouncing nervously in his seat, Alex smiles.

“It has.”

Alex is frightened, because they haven't done something silly like this in a while and sometimes thins, as is the case with the ever-transient nature of human fucking beings, change. Miles leans over and kisses him anyway, because they haven't done this in a while and it is still exactly the same. We fit together like a puzzle, you see. Don't be hammering in your edges elsewhere without me. Alex sighs into his mouth.

“I'm not--” Alex starts, then catches his breath. It's some painful, overwritten metaphor of drink and drugs that had popped into his head – of all those sorts of things you're not supposed to take another taste of lest you fall back into excess, into desperation, into blah fucking blah, he doesn't even care.

“What?”

“Nothing. I missed you.”

Miles looks at him funny, but then Alex kisses him again and pulls him close and it doesn't matter. It's been a minute and he won't wait a minute longer.

“Did you now,” Miles goes on, dropping any awkwardness. Alex nods while they're kissing, which is a bit silly as his forehead knocks against Miles'. Miles puts two hands in his hair and crawls on top of him.

“Did you, did you, did you.”

“You're killing me, Kane.”

“You missed _me_. You American superstar,” Miles says, “You triple-platinum, Billboard top ten, indie breakthrough genius.”

“Is this dirty talk?” Alex inquires in a slow, deep voice. Miles laughs until his eyes get all crinkly, and they have sex on his white leather sofa.

No, they really haven't seen each other much this year. Miles sends him funny pictures once a week and they meet up at events in accidental colour-coordinated jeans, but there's the sorely missed intimacy of sitting 'round one of their flats, Alex's arms stretched up over the arm of the couch, chunks of Miles unkempt hair tickling against his bare stomach as he kisses around his hip bones.

Truthfully, Alex hasn't stopped reminiscing about the days they'd spent every fucking night together since those days had gone away. Week after week in the summers, together with two acoustic guitars and disgruntled interviewers, or separate but never deadly – Miles living out his tour bus like some trendy model girlfriend that's quizzically less famous but more talented than him.

Truthfully, Alex just wants it all over again. For this to be his life.

They hadn't officially planned to take each others' clothes off, even if there was some understated implication of it when Miles invited him over for the first time since he'd been on break from the endless AM tour. There's a moment of shared hesitance as Miles, after kissing down his entire body, thinks they should go upstairs now. Alex can read his mind like that.

Miles' bedroom is as modestly decorated as his living room, quite the same as the last time Alex was up here despite the timelapse. Black bed frame. Relatively unused vanity. An acoustic guitar leaned thoughtfully against a half-full bookshelf.

He once sat down at his kitchen table, buzzed off two pints and a cigarette, and tried to imagine the rest of his life without Miles making love to him. Decades without expertly sentimental fingers caressing the spot of Alex's chin right below his bottom lip while he kisses the top one and moves his hips. It panned out quite undesirable.

We haven't – this year – I've fucking hated every second, alright -- I'd tell you, if you didn't already know me like that, man.

“Al,” Miles says, just the syllable, breathy and sensual. Alex dreams of responding in kind; a gasp, a moan, _Miles Miles Miles. Oh, man. Oh, gee. Fuckin' a._

“Let's make another album,” he gasps instead, then comes all over both their stomachs.

**~**

**2016.**  
18 August.  
Hasselt, Belgium.

_A moment:_

“It's the last week of your tour together,” the interviewer says. The sun is somehow getting in Alex's eyes even though he's wearing sunglasses. “How are you feeling?”

“I know," Alex says.

Miles doesn't add anything to that. He looks briefly lost in thought, then nods and lolls his microphone to the side of his hand, looking at Alex like he's supposed to be the one to find the right word. Instead, Alex furrows his brow and proceeds through another um. An ehm. An exhale. A glance up at Miles where their eyes meet, because his sunglasses are useless and Miles is just good at looking at him.

“It's just gone by so bloody fast.”

**~**

**2016.  
** **26 August.  
** **Paris, France.**

"Go on," Taylor says to him. Alex kisses her on the lips, flutters his eyelids shut briefly and breathes out through his nose. She knocks her palm playfully against the side of his head. "Idiot."

Mirroring the gesture, he bumps his opposite temple with his own hand. "Fool!"

The room feels like it stretches to the ends of the earth. The lights are bright yellow, the one closest to Alex flickering ever so slightly. People keep walking by. Some talking, some just on the way to someplace else before morning comes. Miles, sitting on a stool with an acoustic guitar, catches his eye. Then he smiles and goes back to strumming, never inclined to intrude.

" _Excusez-moi_ ," Alex says, finally, kissing his girlfriend's cheek and stepping off to cross the room. _I love you_ , he thinks in her direction. He knows he does, knows he's thirty years old and fucking pleased about it or something, but he just still hasn't figured out a way to combat the fact that no matter who else and how many of 'em you love, soulmates don't change. Through happy and unhappy and age 18 and age 30, there they stay: sat in the corner of the room, a J-45 acoustic propped on one knee, head bowed thoughtfully as they tune up a G-string for a gig that already happened two hours ago.

"That Is Enough," Alex says on arrival, stomping his foot on the ground between Miles knees and shaking his arms in the air like a WWE champion. Miles delivers him a melancholy _Am_ chord. Alex bends his knees and levels his face with Miles'.

"No more guitars!" he shouts up his nose. Miles presses their foreheads together.

"Oh!" he shouts back, transitioning to a _D_ , "Happy days!"

"Oh, baby," Alex carries on, bringing his hands into a rhythmic clap somewhere behind Miles' head. Miles strums the open strings furiously and he could be playing anything and it'd sound like exactly what Alex wants to hear. Alex spins around and squeezes to sit on the stool next to him, half his arse hanging off the side, and puts his fingers over Miles' like he's teaching him to play something. What a concept that might be. They break out into laughter. The room has formed a respectful bubble around them.

Alex had had a lot of grand fantasies for their last night together. He'd stayed up in hotel bathrooms all year, head tilted back under a lukewarm shower at four in the morning, just thinking of all the ways to say goodbye. Hypothetical tears. Imagined spooning in the moonlight. Some whiskey-fuelled moments of heartfelt confession as Miles might touch every single strand of his hair in an effort to give him something to take home with him until next time. Please.

All the ways Miles might touch him, inside and out, from his toes to his nose, and the quiet things he might say as he leans across the top of him and kisses the bottom of his chin. Miles whispers always ring like fucking poetry falling on Alex's eager ears; a mixture of affectionate laughs and cringey quips. And Alex swears sometimes, in that brand of strange layered affection he carries, Miles orders words strategically in sentences by the letters they start with. A, L – E, X. I, L, O, V, E...

Nothing remotely grandiose occurs because [no reason at all] or it's better that way. Miles strums an _F#_ on repeat while telling his next joke. Alex leans his head on his shoulder and laughs at everything he says. Someone they don't know walks by and shakes his hand for the “top stuff” he's done this year. Yes, for the sake of the story that's not a story at all, it has to be better this way.

Once the man is out of earshot, Miles dons a serious expression and holds his hand out to Alex for a firm handshake.

"Top stuff, Turner," he says in a posh accent, “Until next tea.”

 


End file.
